E-Bola

Bolas, or boleadoras, are throwing weapons used to trap / capture prey. Traditional bolas are made of weights attached to the ends of three connected sections of cord. When thrown, the weights will spin around the taut cords until the bola hits it's target. If the bola is thrown correctly the weights will have enough momentum to completely circle the target multiple times, wrapping / trapping it with the cords. (obligatory wikipedia link)

"E" is an abbreviation for electronic, it was very popular in the 90's before the whole "I" fad. It can still be spotted today lurking next to mail.

This project describes the process of building a bola that uses LEDs and batteries as the weights, and a short length of cord as the cord.

Step 1: Materials

Duct tape - What would we do without it?

Nine 10mm LEDs - Use whatever colors you like. I decided to use a single color for each section of cord.

Step 2: Illuminate the LEDs

Clip the leads from the LEDs so they are about half of their original length.

Attach the LED to the battery with a small piece of duct tape. Each LED / battery combo will undergo a ton of abuse so make sure that they are connected very securely.

To test: Violently throw the illuminated LEDs at walls and other hard surfaces to see if they flicker at all. If they do, reconnect the LEDs to the batteries, and try again.

Step 3: Make the Bola

The goal of this step is to attach two pieces of cord together so the final product is three equal lengths of string, with a fourth shorter section as the throwing handle.

Cut one section of cord to about four feet in length, and another section to about two and half feet.

Fold the four foot section in half to get the center point. Lay the two and a half foot piece of cord across the center point of the other section of cord so three sections of cord are equal length. Tie two knots at the midpoint to hold both cord sections in place.

Tie a knot at the end of the short section. This will be used as a handle while the bola is thrown.

Step 4: E-ify the Bola

Tape the LEDs together in groups of three.

Wrap the end of each equal-length section of cord around a group of LEDs. The cord should be wrapped around twice to prevent the LEDs from flying off while the bola is being thrown. Securely tape the cord to the LED bundles.

You now have E-Bola!

To get rid of your E-Bola, hold it by the handle and swing it over your head. For the most part it should fly tangentially away from the release point. With a small amount of practice you can learn to hit a target, and with a bit more practice you can learn to actually get the bola to wrap around your target.

Step 5: Take Cool Pictures

Have fun with E-Bola.

Try different throwing techniques, or just whip it around.

Special thanks to fungus amungus for all of these awesome extended exposure shots.

Ok saw a comment about the ebola virus and it's symptoms. *sigh* Cue the science segment. The ebola virus is a severe variety of hemorrhagic fever. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, bleeding from ALL orifices, including the pores in the skin (severe cases), and in really severe cases your entrails begin to take on the consistency of thick ketchup. And let's not forget everyone's favorite symptom. Death. No cure, no treatment. Your only hope is to survive the disease running its full course of about two weeks or so after infection occurs. And round of applause for the folks who mentioned the virus and brought on my sudden bout of informative ocd. >_>

Yeah Ebola is one of those things that's already so scary people don't need to truss it up for movies. Well, maybe a little more gratuitous blood, but really, for being +75% water, so much of that's contained in cell membranes that we're more squishy and gelatinous than liquid. So injury tends to be more oozy than splashy.

EVERY orifice. If you have a hole in your body, it has the potential to bleed. That means your nostrils, anus, urethra, mouth, even your the pores you sweat from and your tear ducts. I would suggest simply not ever catching said virus. Fortunately, however, it's not that common. It's not widespread, and it's believed to be transmitted by contact with bodily fluids. Unfortunately, they don't know what the natural reservoir (the organisms that the virus usually live in without causing much harm) actually is, so they have no surefire way to tell you where you might bump into it.

You think that's scary, it has a 90+% fatality rate. There is an airborne strain of Ebola amongst monkeys and lucky for us it's the only strain of simian ebola that we are immune to. It was brought into Virginia through an exotic pet dealer back in the 80's. If we hadn't have been immune it would have been like The Stand.

Read the wiki article you left the address for, and I didn't see it saying anything about that strain being airborne. Also, we're NOT immune to it, in 2009 they had a verified case of that strain passing from ape to pig, then pig to human. So it's POSSIBLE, just not likely. Also the mortality rate of Ebola isn't 90+%, it's 50-90% depending upon which strain/species of ebola you've contracted (humans are vulnerable to all but Reston, which can pass to humans through swine apparently), with some variance from your medical care during your illness. The 90% mortality rate comes from the Zaire strain, which was the first strain discovered. Regardless, it's a nasty piece of work considering that H1N1 and Avian flu and SARS all have gotten major press time even though the mortality rate of those illnesses is pitiable by comparison. If an airborne strain of Ebola did ever make a debut, civilization as we know it would grind to a halt as a plague more deadly than the Black Plague that ravaged Europe consumed the globe. Really the original propagators of the virus are bats. Or rather that's the current theory. Primates die when exposed so it can't thrive in us enough to survive as a species, and after testing 30,000 species of plants animals fish insects and reptiles, the best guess is bats. Bats nibble fruit, the fruit falls, stupid monkeys eat the fruit, become infected, then starving natives eat the stupid monkeys. Granted cooking should kill the virus, but you touch their bodily fluids when you skin and butcher them, thus providing a means for infection.